McAfee Releases First-Quarter Threats Report

Today McAfee Avert Labs released its Threats Report for the first quarter of 2009. In it we reveal that cybercriminals have taken control of almost 12 million new IP addresses since January, a 50 percent increase since 2008. The United States is now home to the largest percentage of botnet-infected computers, currently hosting 18 percent of all zombie machines. Seems the bad guys are attempting to recover from last November’s takedown of a central spam-hosting ISP by rebuilding their army.

Other Key Findings

The Koobface virus has made a resurgence, and more than 800 new variants of the virus were discovered in March alone.

Servers hosting legitimate content have increased in popularity with malware writers as a means for distributing malicious and illegal content.

Cybercriminals are increasing their use of URL redirects and Web 2.0 sites to disguise their locations.

Compared with the overall landscape, the Conficker worm represents a small subset of all threat reports. AutoRun malware, on the other hand, represented 10 percent of reported detections during the first quarter–quite a bit more than Conficker itself.

You can find the full text of the “McAfee Threats Report: First Quarter 2009″ here.